COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS SIMULATIONS OF A LABORATORY FLASH REACTOR RELEVANT TO A NOVEL IRONMAKING PROCESS

A computational fluid dynamic approach was used to simulate a flash reactor for a novel flash ironmaking process. In this simulation, H-2 is injected with O-2 through a non-premixed burner in the top part of the reactor to form a flame. The Euler-Lagrange approach was used in the CFD model to solve a set of gas-phase momentum, energy and turbulent closure equations. The stochastic trajectory model was used to describe particle dispersion due to turbulence. As the volume fraction of particle was in the order of 10(-5) the system was treated as a dilute flow, namely the interparticle collisions were neglected. The partial combustion mechanism used in this model consisted of 7 chemical reactions involving 6 species. The temperature profile obtained from the simulation satisfactorily agreed with the experimental measurements, and the reduction degree obtained from the model also agreed with experimental results.